by L. R. Wright
She talked, telling them facts, putting one fact after another like one foot followed another. She spoke haltingly at first, then with growing confidence. As she talked her voice grew hoarse, and the swath of sunlight crept closer. Mrs. O’Hara made a bargain with her deity: if she finished her story, got it all rightly and properly told before that swath of sunlight had crept across the floor to her feet, that would mean that she would have succeeded. But she wasn’t allowed to leave anything out, or to talk faster than was normal for her. And she would keep to this bargain, because she had an honorable soul.
Mrs. O’Hara told them about Tom and Raylene. About pushing Raylene down the basement steps and having Tom blamed for it. She told them how her life had changed—she described as best she could her reluctant commitment to winged fate, and her refining of this commitment: ten sweepings in ten years.
Cindi scribbled. The sergeant’s gaze remained on Mrs. O’Hara’s face, a gentle curious prodding.
Mrs. O’Hara told them about the hardware store that had burned down. Twice.
She told them about the pastor she had killed in a car crash.
She told them about the young mother she had poisoned.
And about the old woman she had smothered to death.
She stopped, occasionally, to catch her breath, to drink some more tea, and tried to see the expressions on the faces of her confessors. She squinted at them, shielding her eyes from the encroaching sun.
“I’ll close the blind,” said Eddie, starting to move toward the window.
“No,” said Mrs. O’Hara quickly. “No.” The sun was in her eyes, which accounted for her inability to read the faces of the reporter and the sergeant, but it hadn’t yet reached her feet—not yet.
“The next three were different,” she said, and tried to explain how they had been different.
“You changed your method,” said Eddie. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” said Mrs. O’Hara. “I can’t say.” She started to shake. “I have no explanation,” she said loudly. The shaking got much worse. “I wanted to see their faces,” she said finally. It came out as a sigh. She waited, her head bent. “I wanted to see their faces when I struck them.”
Cindi managed to get it down—“I wanted to see their faces”—before the strength left her hand, which had become numb, and the pen fell from her fingers. She looked at it lying on the floor. Finally, Eddie picked it up and handed it to her. Cindi looked up at her gratefully, and Eddie saw that her eyes were filled with tears.
“What did you do with Rochelle’s body?” asked Eddie. “Rochelle—that’s the waitress,” she added, trying to keep her voice expressionless.
Mrs. O’Hara had hoped, perhaps, for compassion. She heard none in this woman’s voice. But perhaps that was because of the sunlight, which was dreadfully bright now, and certainly strong enough to distort sound. “I came across an excavation,” she said. “Someone building a house, I believe. Out in the country. Away from everything. Like my cabin is. Except my cabin doesn’t have a basement. I put her in the excavation and shoveled dirt on top of her, from the pile that was on the ground.”
Cindi stretched her hand and massaged its fingers, then wrote again, laboriously, in her notebook.
“How long did your husband get?” asked Eddie.
“He was out in eight years,” said Mrs. O’Hara. “But I never saw him again. I don’t know where he went, or what happened to him.”
Eddie was about to ask her another question when Mrs. O’Hara said, “Ah,” so regretfully, so sorrowfully, that for a moment Eddie thought this was remorse. “I didn’t quite make it,” said Mrs. O’Hara, looking at her feet. The metal toes of her workboots glinted in the sun.
***
Alberg had Ralph Mondini usher Mrs. O’Hara into a cell while he listened to the tape recording of her confession.
Then he sat back in his chair and planted his foot on an open desk drawer. “Ten,” he said. “She’d set herself a goal of ten.”
“Yeah,” said Eddie, who was standing by the window, looking outside. She thought she was hungry, but she wasn’t certain.
“So. Tom. Who got off easy. Raylene. The reverend.”
Eddie turned and saw that he was referring to his notebook, where he had jotted things, from time to time, as they listened to the tape.
“The hardware store guy.” He glanced up at her. “That was here—in our jurisdiction. Arson. Yeah.” They had suspected the owner for a while, or tried to, because he was such a mean and nasty son of a bitch. “So she didn’t always kill them.” He looked at the notebook again. “That’s four. Plus the one who died of food poisoning. Five. And there’s the old lady she smothered—six. Plus Rebecca Granger, Rochelle Williamson, and Janet Maine.” He squinted at Eddie, waiting.
“That’s nine,” said Eddie. “I guess she’s gonna be short.”
“Hmmmm,” said Alberg. He lifted his foot from the drawer, closed it, and sat up. “I think I’ll go have a talk with her.”
***
He spoke to her through the bars of the cell. “You only got nine,” he said.
Mrs. O’Hara, sitting on the edge of the cot, didn’t reply.
“So what about Number Ten?” asked Alberg. “What about Ivan Dyakowski?”
If it hadn’t been for that shaft of sunlight, Mrs. O’Hara told herself, she would have made it. If they had started talking just a few minutes earlier, she would have finished before the sunlight struck her shoes. Or if the conversation had taken place somewhere else entirely, then it never would have occurred to her to make that stupid bargain.
But make it she had.
And now she would have to be satisfied with nine.
“I’m going to die soon,” she told Alberg. And as she spoke, a revelation stole quietly, cordially, across her soul. She was already dead. She had killed herself. Like a snake eating its own tail, the blows she had delivered on behalf of justice had been lashes stripping away her own flesh.
She looked at the policeman in amazement. She had never felt such pain.
She was Number Ten, she realized, thunderstruck. The accumulation of Numbers One through Nine, beginning with poor, pale Raylene, had compelled this.
How could something so manifest have been hidden from her for so long?
It was a flawless truth.
A mockery.
She told him, then, about the marmalade on Susan Atkinson’s kitchen table.
Chapter 25 Sunday, April 7
ALBERG WAS UP early the next morning, sitting in his backyard drinking coffee and craving a cigarette, for some reason, for the first time in months and months.
After his talk with Mrs. O’Hara he had called Susan Atkinson, then sent Ralph Mondini over to her apartment to collect the jar of marmalade.
He had also arranged for Mrs. O’Hara to have a lawyer, whether she wanted one or not.
Cindi Webster had sat on the bench in the reception area while all this was going on, looking dazed. Eddie eventually took her off to Earl’s for coffee and a sandwich.
“I think I’ll talk to her lawyer,” Cindi had said on her way out the door, “before I write anything.”
“That’s probably a good idea,” Alberg agreed. He stretched out his hand. “Thanks for your help. I appreciate it.”
Alberg picked up his mug of coffee from the white plastic table next to him and took a sip.
They had to look for Rochelle Williamson’s body now. And investigate the earlier deaths for which Mrs. O’Hara had claimed responsibility.
Alberg put the coffee mug down again and stirred restlessly in the canvas chair that sat upon his small brick patio, listening to the birds and the far-off sound of a boat motoring out of the harbor at the bottom of the hill.
***
“Dad,” said Eddie. “I’m sorry to call so early.” She was standing in the middle of her living room. The blinds were yanked up as high as they would go, letting spring sunshine spill into the house, which was dusty and felt disorganized
because she had not unpacked and arranged her belongings personally but had let her father do this for her.
“What is it, Eddie? There’s nothing wrong, is there?” he said anxiously.
“I don’t know, Dad. You tell me. Did you give Alan my phone number?”
Susan Atkinson’s apartment, now—that was the kind of place Eddie could be happy in. Lots of cheerful colors. No damn dust.
“Dad? Answer me.” But in his silence, he already had. “Shit. You did, didn’t you?”
“Edwina, he cares so much about you—”
She hung up. “Jesus Christ.” She ran her hands through her long, thick hair. She threw her head back and laughed. Planted her fists on her hips. “Jesus H. Christ.”
She considered phoning Alan. But he would probably take that as encouragement.
No—she’d wait for him to call again. She knew he would. And when he did: “Alan,” she would say to him. “Fuck off. Don’t ever call me again. Or—or—”
Or what?
Eddie wrapped her hair around her hand and pinned it on top of her head.
The phone rang. She knew it would be her father—it was far too early for Alan—but she ignored it and looked critically around her house. Today she would organize things the way she damn well wanted them. And she would do the laundry, she thought, as the phone continued to ring. And the ironing. And buy some groceries, so that she could finally begin eating at home, as she’d planned. And tomorrow she’d find someone to come in once or twice a month to clean the house.
A cleaning lady.
Eddie sat down on the sofa, her spine ashudder. Jesus.
The phone rang and rang—she had unhooked the answering machine.
A cleaning lady.
***
Cassandra watched Alberg for a while from the sunporch before opening the screen door and going down the steps to join him. She sat in a lawn chair next to his and took his hand. Alberg turned his face to her, but didn’t speak. Cassandra stroked his cheek, slowly, from the prominent bone at the outer edge of his eye down to the corner of his mouth, her fingertips loving, and curious. “If you start the paperwork now,” she said, “how long will it take?”
He leaned into her hand, which she flattened, then, against the side of his face. “I don’t know. A few months, maybe. It depends on who replaces me. How soon they can replace me.”
“Oh, well then,” said Cassandra, “in that case, we’ll never get out of here. It’s well known that you are completely and utterly irreplaceable.”
Alberg grinned and took hold of her hand, placing his lips in the middle of her palm.
“Let’s do it,” said Cassandra softly. “What the hell.”
For more “Karl Alberg” novels by LR Wright
and other Felony mysteries,
please visit our website:
FelonyAndMayhem.com
All the characters and events portrayed in this work are fictitious.
ACTS OF MURDER
A Felony & Mayhem mystery
PUBLISHING HISTORY
First Canadian print edition (Doubleday Canada): 1997
First US print edition (Scribners): 1998
Felony & Mayhem print and digital editions: 2019
Copyright © 1997 by L. R.Wright
All rights reserved
E-book ISBN: 978-1-63194-169-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Wright, Laurali, 1939- author.
Title: Acts of murder / LR Wright.
Description: Felony & Mayhem edition. | New York : Felony & Mayhem Press, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018017515| ISBN 9781631941658 (trade pbk.) | ISBN 9781631941696 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Alberg, Karl (Fictitious character)--Fiction. | British Columbia--Fiction. | GSAFD: Detective and mystery stories.
Classification: LCC PR9199.3.W68 A64 2018 | DDC 813/.54--dc21
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018017515
